While seeking to build from the outside in, with full awareness of the particularities of region, neighborhood, site, and tradition, we should also undertake the planning required to build from the inside out. What functions, precisely, do we require of our home? Each of us will answer differently, and a family's patterns will inevitably change as the individuals change, as children leave and builders age. Anyone who builds an innovative, appropriate shelter hopes to be free from preconception and perspicacious about small, important elements. If we intend to abandon the pretense and wisdom of conventional architecture and still build a successful home, we must carry with us only truly essential luggage.
Happiness is a good measure for necessity. For example, it will not make us particularly happy to know that we are expensively hoarding eighty gallons of hot water in our domestic hot water tank. And what is the widest temperature range within which we can live healthily and happily? The answer to this crucial question, factored together with the meteorological realities of our chosen site, determines for most of us the largest expense in our energy budget: the cost of heating and cooling our space. If you hope to build a successful independent home, you must identify and answer these and many other energy questions completely and flexibly before building starts.
For nearly every conventional domestic energy requirement, alternatives exist which reduce the need to consume fuel. Click here for a larger (105kB 854 pixels wide) version of the chart.
In the past, houses have been planned assuming indefinite continuation of present circumstances: straight-line thinking. Our whole human era is called the Holocene by archaeologists: an unusual time in geologic history when nothing much changed. Nature abhors straight lines as much as it abhors vacuums, and this forecasting technique is not viable if change is imminent. Selection of heating and lighting strategies, for example, has invariably been based on current costs. Regulators, noting scarcities, pollution, and growing recognition of the health costs of fossil fuel energy dependency, anticipate steeply rising energy costs in the near future. In earlier chapters we recommended selecting for cost-effectiveness based on comparisons of energy consumption over an appliance's whole life plus its original equipment cost.
Consider glass, the most important energy appliance in most homes. Glass easily outlasts most houses, but will high-tech glass last as well? A glass-and-sealant bottle encased in metal, containing inert gas and a plastic film is undeniably more expensive and possibly less durable than a single pane of glass, and much more efficient than a single pane as a wall, but will it pay for itself over an acceptably long lifespan, one that may be longer than our own lifetimes? If so, then high-tech glass is the correct choice for an ancestral home even if we shall not be around at payback time. If windows demonstrate a high rate of failure after two, five, ten, or even twenty years, the deal may not be as attractive.
Since the primary energy consumers in a conventional house are space heating and cooling, refrigeration, hot water, and lighting, conscientious examination of these largest energy uses will reveal ways to lighten our load and simplify our lives. Some reductions are available to us right now, and can be put in service immediately. Other solutions will be found and incorporated into our house plans as we begin the process of building. Many of the best ways to lighten the eventual energy budget will involve site and structure, and therefore should be developed before a final decision is made about the site.
Naturally, a home's energy budget depends on region. In a tropical climate like Hawaii's, a well-designed home on a benign site will require neither heating nor cooling. In northern Alaska, and along the northern tier of states, a 10,000-degree-day heating regime or worse, the best-sited and best-constructed home will present a heavy burden in wintertime lighting and heating. Even if energy costs are tolerable at present, there are powerful reasons to seek to reduce energy consumption from every energy-consuming device and design feature in the home.
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